Focusing on Chicago (Illinois), this report describes the magnitude of issues related to the education of non-English-speaking immigrants, and presents an overview of both the learning resource materials available to support bilingual education in the Chicago School System and the availability of materials in foreign languages in the Chicago Public Library. The premise being explored is that perhaps the school system is not adequately supporting bilingual programs and that the subsequent burden is falling on the public library. The overview of the school system includes a table summarizing the number of transitional bilingual programs--which are designed to provide students with the opportunity to learn in their native languages and at their own level of cognitive skill to prevent them from lagging in school performance while learning English--in each of 18 language groups at the high school and K-8 levels in the Chicago area. The addresses and telephone numbers of four multilingual education resource and information centers are also provided. Following the overview is an analysis of federal grant proposals (Library Services Reconstruction Act--LSCA) submitted by the Chicago Public Library over a 3-year period dealing with bilingual and multilingual programs. Finally, this study identifies some of the policy questions that face school, academic, and public libraries confronted with the challenge of serving disparate populations of patrons. (12 references) (SD)